tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-76199197362877749062014-10-03T03:30:35.321-04:00Literature R Us—Alan Vanneman’s websiteAlan Vannemanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16862545272673601332noreply@blogger.comBlogger1316125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7619919736287774906.post-91701002083774298472013-11-10T19:38:00.001-05:002013-11-10T19:38:35.358-05:00LITERATURE R US IS MOVING TO TUMBLR!<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 15pt; margin: 0in 0in 12pt; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;"><span style="font-size: 11pt;">Actually, we have moved. Catch up with us <a href="http://avanneman.tumblr.com/">here</a>. The actual address is http://avanneman.tumblr.com/<br /><br />The new Literature R Us is still a work in progress, but I've decided that if I waited until it was finished, well, that would be too long. If you have a wide screen, you make have columns of text overlapping. Adjust the size of your window until things look better. You'll see links to my two dead tree books, <i>Sherlock Holmes and the Giant Rat of Sumatra </i>and <i>Sherlock Holmes and the Hapsburg Tiara </i>(also available in an unabridged audio verson), plus a free ebook, <i>Three Bullets</i>, a recreation/updating of Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe. I pan to be adding links for new, nonfree ebooks in the near future, once I get the hang of this self-publishing thing.<br /><br />So head over to Tumblr for cartoons, tunes, and commentary, five days a week, 99% of the time.</span></div>Alan Vannemanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16862545272673601332noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7619919736287774906.post-82670063458922250382013-11-08T06:00:00.000-05:002013-11-08T06:00:13.408-05:00Obama Bubble? Nuh-uh<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 15pt; margin: 0in 0in 12pt; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;"><span style="font-size: 11pt;"> <br />What’s Obama’s problem? The <i>Wash Post</i>’s Dana Milbank “<a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/dana-milbank-obama-is-bubble-wrapped/2013/11/05/8779997a-465b-11e3-a196-3544a03c2351_story.html?hpid=z3">explains</a>”:</span></div>In one account of what even administration officials acknowledge is a debacle, the <i>Wall Street Journal</i> reported that Obama’s policy advisers were aware long ago that the president’s promise that “if you like your insurance plan, you will keep it” wouldn’t hold up. “White House policy advisers objected to the breadth of Mr. Obama’s ‘keep your plan’ promise,” the Journal reported, citing a former senior administration official. “They were overruled by political aides,” the former official said. The White House said it was unaware of the objections.”<br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 15pt; margin: 0in 0in 12pt; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;"><span style="font-size: 11pt;"> <br />I admit that I find this confusing. White House policy advisors tell White House political aides that the president shouldn’t be saying “if you like it you can keep it,” and the “White House” says “it” didn’t know about this. Hmmmmm.<br /><br />Well, I think we can skip all this “who knew” jive. President Obama is renowned for his detailed grasp of policy issues. Anyone reading liberal outlets has known for several years that one of the goals of the Affordable Care Act was to force insurers to stop selling what liberals regarded as “crappy,” useless catastrophic insurance packages that did not help pay for routine health maintenance procedures, which is what liberals mean by “health care.” And surely Obama knew this too. And surely what Obama “meant” was, “if you have a decent health care plan, you can keep it. If you don’t, we’ll force your insurer to give you one.”<br /><br />Obama and his aides might have figured that some people would not benefit from this favor they intended to provide. Some people with catastrophic insurance might be actually suffering from a catastrophic illness, and might in fact be receiving high-quality, low-cost care. For such people, the loss of their crappy insurance plan might mean, well, death.<br /><br />So maybe both Obama and his advisors should have thought a little more than they did. But to claim that Obama didn’t know that what he was saying was nothing more than a deliberate half truth is a lie.<br /><br /><b>Afterwords<br /></b>Milbanks is even more laughable when he expands his bubble theory to “explain” the war in Iraq. Supposedly, late in his presidency, Dub-Ya complained to Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chair Admiral Mike Mullen that “when I made the decision on Iraq, I went around the room to everybody at that table, every principal. ‘You in? Any doubts?’ Nothing from anybody.”<br /><br />If George really said that, my opinion of him just sunk a couple of inches. Really, George? You tell your staff that quote “I’m going to kick Saddam Hussein’s motherfucking ass all over the Middle East” and then you expect someone to pipe up and say “Golly gee, Mr. President. If you did that, you’d be making a huge mistake?” It’s a matter of record, which Milbank surely ought to know, that people in the Bush Administration who cast doubt on the invasion of Iraq were either silenced or bounced. The notion that Bush was failed by his advisors is nonsense. </span></div>Alan Vannemanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16862545272673601332noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7619919736287774906.post-56351741225013067982013-11-07T06:00:00.000-05:002013-11-07T06:00:11.114-05:00"In a Crepuscule with Nellie," played twice<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 15pt; margin: 0in 0in 12pt; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;"><span style="font-size: 11pt;">Monk’s tune dedicated to his wife, played first by Jason Moran (piano), Tarus Mateen (bass), and Nasheef Waits (drums) and then by Mark Turner (sax), David Virelles (piano), Ben Street (bass), and Paul Motian (drums). Posted by <a href="http://www.youtube.com/user/netta07a?feature=watch ">netta07a</a> </span></div><br /><iframe width="560" height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/E9LZ5kLZ3To" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe><br />Alan Vannemanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16862545272673601332noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7619919736287774906.post-26027062408257842012013-11-06T08:38:00.001-05:002013-11-07T21:52:46.582-05:00Eff-Dee Deification: A (continuing) Democratic Disease<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 15pt; margin: 0in 0in 12pt; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;"><span style="font-size: 11pt;">The severe embarrassment on the “Left” by the Obama Administration’s disastrous rollout of the Affordable Care Act has taken a variety of forms, from the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” approach advocated by Joan Walsh at Salon, aka “The first rule about the Affordable Care Act is ‘Don’t talk about Affordable Care Act’; “The second rule about the Affordable Care Act is ‘Don’t talk about Affordable Care Act,’” which is both cumbersome and self-defeating, to Mike Konczal’s “<a href="http://www.nextnewdeal.net/rortybomb/what-kind-problem-aca-rollout-liberalism">Back to the New Deal</a>” approach, advocated, quite appropriately enough, at “Next New Deal: the blog of the Roosevelt Institute.”<br /><br />According to Mike, “My man Franklin Delano Roosevelt may not have known about JavaScript and agile programming, but he knew a few things about the public provisioning of social insurance, and he realized the second category, while conceptually more work for the government, can eliminate a lot of unnecessary administrative problems.” Mike’s “second category” social insurance is universal, mandatory, and federally run, as opposed to the ACA’s triple-layered compromise half of this and half of that won’t everyone please be a good sport and help us out with this thing, which, as the <i>Washington Post</i> <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/challenges-have-dogged-obamas-health-plan-since-2010/2013/11/02/453fba42-426b-11e3-a624-41d661b0bb78_story.html">has amply documented</a>, allowed an hysterical right-wing backlash to half rip the entire program to pieces.<br /><br />But Mike should know a little bit more about his man Franklin Delano. It’s hardly a secret that the original Social Security Act was far from universal. In fact, it deliberately ignored the people who needed it the most—the millions of black and white sharecroppers in the South, and the mostly white itinerant “hired men” of the North, as well as family servants, who were much more common then than now (because so many people were so poor, help was much more “affordable”). These people, and most of the others at the bottom of the economic ladder, were deliberately written out of the act, first because they were largely disenfranchised, either formally or informally, and second because FDR did not want to antagonize small farmers and the middle class in general. The political basis of the Roosevelt Coalition was largely southern small farmers and the small businesses economically dependent upon them, and northern factory workers, who could be organized politically either through their unions or the big city Democratic machines. <br /><br />Roosevelt knew that expecting southerners to pay FICA taxes for their tenant farmers—black ones, in particular—would have been politically disastrous. So he turned his back on the blacks, both in writing the Social Security Act and in shutting down “relief”—principally Harry Hopkins’ WPA—after winning re-election in 1936. The reduction in federal spending, coupled with the deflationary effects of the Social Security Act itself—money was coming into the federal government but nothing was going out in the form of benefits—helped push the country into severe recession, from which it was only rescued by the start of World War II.<br /><br />In fact, Obama should have studied the New Deal—the real New Deal—more carefully as well. He might have noticed how cunning, cautious, and even callous the real Roosevelt could be. Two generations of Democrats have pursued universal health care because it was “right.” They should have noticed that most Americans already have health care, and that for them health care “reform” means “more for less,” when, in fact, most of us are getting heavily subsidized health care already, either through our employers or through Medicare.<br /><br />Obama sought to thread the needle by balancing the costs of expanded health care by substantial savings via “rationalization” of delivery of services. He should have known that 1) savings achieved via bureaucratic reform never, ever match the goals of the planners, and that 2) health care is something about which people are aggressively irrational—because they want to be told that they will, in effect, live forever, which ain’t going to happen any time soon.<br /><br />Democrats should not have to ask Republicans permission to enact social reforms. But a more modest program would not have provoked the wave of outrage that the Republicans rode to power in 2010. Absent that opposition, the implementation of a more modest program also would have been achieved much more smoothly. Liberals like both Mike and Barack tend somehow to think that the existing Social Security program sprang full-blown from Eff-Dee’s forehead, like Athena born of Zeus. In fact, Social Security today is the result of more than fifty years of “reform,” pushed along by an ever-growing political alliance of recipients. </span></div><br /><br /><br />Alan Vannemanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16862545272673601332noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7619919736287774906.post-34105189800847408282013-11-05T06:00:00.001-05:002013-11-05T06:00:10.976-05:00Dave Weigel now officially Chris Christie's bitch<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 15pt; margin: 0in 0in 12pt; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;"><span style="font-size: 11pt;">Over at <i>Slate</i>, Dave Weigel <a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2013/11/chris_christie_new_jersey_and_the_gop_the_republican_governor_is_expected.html">devotes about ten column inches</a> to letting Chris Christie tell us how much black folks love him, followed by about three column feet about how Big Chris is going to stomp, stomp, stomp his hapless Democratic opponent into the ground.<br /><br />Which is surely, surely, surely true. But then Dave ends his piece with the following: </span></div>Christie is telling crowds that they really should consider voting for more Republicans, if only to send a message. “If you reward bad behavior, just like what happens with kids, you’ll get more bad behavior,” he says in Somers Point. “If you reward good behavior, you’ll get more good behavior. You know, Tuesday night, America’s watching. America’s watching and they want a new signal of hope for the country’s future, after all the dysfunction in Washington, D.C. They’re gonna look to New Jersey for that hope, and we’re gonna provide it to them on Tuesday.”<br /><br />I look around the room and see more than one grown man daubing away tears at what Christie’s just said about their state. Voter Jim Logan pulls me aside.<br /><br />“Only Ronald Reagan could have given a speech like that,” he says. “That last sentence? Yeah, he’s running.”<br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 15pt; margin: 0in 0in 12pt; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;"><span style="font-size: 11pt;"> <br />Didn’t Dave see at least one grown man laughing his ass off at such self-promoting crap? Perhaps even more to the point, hasn’t Dave read all the advance chatter from Mark Halperin and John Heilemann’s sure to be best-selling campaign pot boiler <i>Double Down</i> about the “garish controversies” swirling about the big guy’s big butt?<br /><br />According to <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/review-double-down-on-the-2012-election-by-mark-halperin-and-john-heilemann/2013/11/01/8bf4f050-3fdd-11e3-a751-f032898f2dbc_story.html?tid=pm_pop">Peter Hamby’s review of <i>DD</i>, </a>when Team Romney began to consider, unenthusiastically, to be sure, the possibility of choosing Christie as Romney’s running mate, they came up with a serious can of worms: “a Justice Department investigation into his free-spending ways as U.S. attorney, his habit of steering government contracts to friends and political allies, a defamation lawsuit that emerged during a 1994 run for local office, a politically problematic lobbying career that included work on behalf of a financial firm that employed Bernie Madoff.”<br /><br />There’s no doubt that Christie’s “Who’s Your Daddy?” shtick is box office in Jersey, but how’s it going to sell in South Carolina? What about that Muslim judge he appointed? What’s his stand on immigration, or, as they like to call it down south, furriners? How good are the odds that Chris Christie is just the latest in the long line of Great Moderate Republican Hopes who get their asses handed to them when they come up against the true believers who own the Republican Party? I’d say, pretty damned good. </span></div>Alan Vannemanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16862545272673601332noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7619919736287774906.post-27784930294939640892013-11-04T06:00:00.000-05:002013-11-04T08:44:30.711-05:00Pseudo New Yorker<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-Q8G3EWNv2DY/UnVSeiJCsOI/AAAAAAAABHA/W0wwKNWCDeY/s1600/131007_contest_p465.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-Q8G3EWNv2DY/UnVSeiJCsOI/AAAAAAAABHA/W0wwKNWCDeY/s400/131007_contest_p465.jpg" /></a><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 15pt; margin: 0in 0in 12pt; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;"><span style="font-size: 11pt;">Legal humor <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/humor/caption/">here</a>.<br /><br />“Presumably, it’s attached to something <i>bigger</i> than the house. Otherwise, it would make no sense.”<br /><br />“I told you they were your kind of people.”<br /><br />“I don’t know why they don’t get rid of that. We haven’t had a theft since the Johnsons back in 2008.”<br /><br />“Too pre-war to live, I’d say.”<br /><br />“Well, who would want to live in a neighborhood where a thing like that <i>improves</i> property values?”<br /><br />“Okay, I’m <i>not</i> just saying that the Johnsons had theirs galvanized. I’m saying that <i>we</i> ought to have <i>ours</i> galvanized.”<br /><br />“No, Godzilla couldn’t bite through that mother. Because Godzilla doesn’t exist.”<br /><br />“Are we supposed to ask about it, or are we not supposed to ask about it?”<br /><br />“Well, even if it were asleep, you could hear it snoring. Good lord, a dog that size, you could hear it <i>breathing</i>. You could hear it <i>not</i> breathing.”<br /><br />“Of course, there’s the whole weakest link thing.” </span></div>Alan Vannemanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16862545272673601332noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7619919736287774906.post-24231496331705162912013-11-01T06:00:00.000-04:002013-11-01T06:00:08.251-04:00Saudi Arabia and Israel: A marriage made in heaven?<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 15pt; margin: 0in 0in 12pt; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;"><span style="font-size: 11pt;">When will the lion lie down with the lamb? Well, not any time soon. When will Israel lie down with Saudi Arabia? Well, right about now, judging from “warnings” emerging from neo-con <strike>windbags</strike> gods like Charles “Krautman” Krauthammer, <a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/361948/krauthammers-take-obama-has-saudis-reconsidering-their-friendship-us-nro-staff">who says</a> that the failure of President Obama to intervene in Syria, plus his obvious desire to cozy up to Iran, has to make the Saudis “wonder what kind of friend is the United States and can they survive the American friendship.” Meanwhile, Lee Smith, less hampered by divinity, is already <a href="http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/end-pax-americana_765638.html">flat-out advocating an alliance</a>: “in the wake of a bad American deal with [Iranian President] Rouhani, the Israelis may come in quite handy [for the Saudis], as the only local power capable of standing up to a nuclear-armed Iran or stopping the Iranian nuclear program in its tracks.” Paul Wolfowitz, prescient as always,* was <a href="http://avanneman.blogspot.com/2013/04/its-not-too-soon-to-tell-that-paul.html">making nice with the Saudis </a>waaay back in April of this year.<br /><br />Why are the leading citizens of AIPAC Nation suddenly liking the Saudis, a nation that has spent untold billions on vicious anti-Semitic propaganda over the past few decades and teaches its kids that Jews are “apes”? Well, obviously, they like part of the tune the Saudis are whistling—heavy U.S. involvement in the Middle East to “reform” Syria and deter Iran. But that, of course, is exactly what President Obama is not fixin’ to do.<br /><br />It will probably never be known if the president’s decision to allow Congress to decide if the U.S. would bomb Syria was guileless or guileful. It’s <i>very</i> hard to believe that the last-minute, “Putin to the rescue” finale was planned in any way, but it all worked out splendidly for the president. By allowing the Tea Party caucus to attack the idea of U.S. intervention in the Middle East as a means to attacking <i>him</i> (which they will always do as a matter of reflex), Obama strengthened the anti-intervention wing of the Republican Party in an extraordinary manner. Old Bull John McCain suddenly sounded like an old man who needed a nap and a sedative.<br /><br />Obama topped that by suddenly embracing the new president of Iran, a stunning move that I think no one would have predicted only a few months ago. Back in 2011, the question seemed to be how long can Obama avoid being pressured into bombing Iran. Two years later, we’re taking them out to lunch.<br /><br />Okay, things haven’t gone that far. A real deal with Iran is probably beyond the president’s grasp. The Tea Party is going to oppose pretty much anything the president proposes, and the sanctions legislation enacted back in the days when AIPAC determined U.S. Middle East policy forms a powerful barrier to any agreement. But to hear Charles Krauthammer saying how awful it is that Obama is being so mean to our good friends the Saudis, well, that’s rich. </span></div>*Okay, not <i>always</i>.<br /><br />Alan Vannemanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16862545272673601332noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7619919736287774906.post-7823359898296102392013-10-31T06:00:00.000-04:002013-10-31T06:00:10.049-04:00Paul Ryan's total phonus-balonus budget (which doesn’t even exist!)<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 15pt; margin: 0in 0in 12pt; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;"><span style="font-size: 11pt;">I should probably stop using so many parentheses and exclamation points in my heads, but when they fit they fit, you know what I mean? Actually, the fact that there isn’t going to be any grand budget deal growing out of the Tea Party’s “shut it down” fiasco is becoming so obvious that I scarcely even need to write this post, but for a brief shining moment it seemed that Paulie’s Oct. 8 <a href="http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303442004579123943669167898">thumb-sucker </a>on fiscal matters for the <i>Wall Street Journal</i> had once more made him the hero of the Acela crowd, and, if even one dying ember of that fantasy yet remains, I’d like to stamp it out.<br /><br />There seems to be a compulsion among “serious” people to believe that President Obama represents an extreme in the current “crisis,” which really isn’t all that bad. He doesn’t. If anything, in his eagerness to do Wall Street’s bidding, which is, fortunately, not quite the same thing as the <i>Wall Street Journal</i>’s bidding, the president is pretty much right of center. It’s just that the Republicans aren’t at the table at all. Basically, they’re in another world. The president wants to deal, but all they want to do is play video games.<br /><br />Let’s recall that Ryan’s original budget called for no cuts at all, ever, to Social Security, and no cuts to Medicare benefits ever for anyone 55 or over, while at the same time counting on the Medicare savings envisioned by the Affordable Care Act. When Ryan became Mitt Romney’s running mate, the Medicare savings were discarded, and instead seniors were assured that there would be no cuts, ever, to their benefits—the same thing the Tea Party said while riding to victory in 2010. After the election, Ryan bragged about how seniors had supported the Romney-Ryan ticket. Then he put the ACA savings back in his brand new budget, and then (of course) also voted against the ACA. How many times are you going to eat that cake, Paulie?<br /><br />Earlier this year, the Republicans in the House of Representatives approved the spending targets set by Ryan’s new budget—no cuts to entitlements, “restored” spending for defense, to make up for sequestered funds, and deep cuts in domestic discretionary spending. But when it came time to vote on actual appropriations bills to make those cuts, the House leadership didn’t even bring the bills to the floor, because they knew they couldn’t pass them. Which is the real reason we had the government shutdown in the first place.<br /><br />Despite all their grand talk, the Tea Party does not want a grand bargain, because that would involve making actual cuts in Social Security and Medicare, and the geezer vote is their ace in the hole. What they really want to do is cut spending on the poor, and no one else. House Republicans did vote to split the old “farm” bill into two pieces, one for farm subsidies and one for Food Stamps, cutting Food Stamps by 10 percent while providing full funding for crop insurance subsidies for millionaires. And Ryan voted with them on this one.<br /><br />Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has “promised” that there will be no more government shutdowns, though I don’t remember him being elected Speaker of the House, and I also notice that he didn’t quite promise not to threaten to refuse to raise the debt ceiling. I suspect that there will be a lot more sound and fury to come, signifying nothing, because that is the sum and substance of the Tea Party program. </span></div><br />Alan Vannemanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16862545272673601332noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7619919736287774906.post-75493278588771864042013-10-30T06:00:00.000-04:002013-10-30T06:00:02.938-04:00Detroit Denial: A Democratic Disease (but not entirely!)<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 15pt; margin: 0in 0in 12pt; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;"><span style="font-size: 11pt;">Remember when we were told that the average retired city worker in Detroit was receiving a pension of no more than $19,000 a year? Well, it turns out that was only sort of accurate. In fact, when there was extra money in the pension system, it was paid out in the form of “bonuses to retirees, supplements to workers not yet retired and cash to the families of workers who died before becoming eligible to collect a pension,” according to <a href="http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2013/09/25/undisclosed-payments-cost-detroit-pension-plan-billions/?_r=0">Mary Williams Walsh</a>, writing in the <i>NY Times</i>’ “Dealbook.” Over the past several decades, these off-the-book payments amounted around $2 billion, according to Walsh.<br /><br />When that $19,000 figure was first bandied about, I took it with a mighty draught of salt, and it turns out that I was right. In fact, I would be enormously surprised if this is the last “surprise” that the Detroit pension system has for us. It is one of the hallmarks of modern urban corruption that no one really knows what is going on. Knowledge is power, but ignorance is safety, and while the outside experts kvetch and moan, the bureaucratic moles simply move the pea under a new thimble.<br /><br />A few months ago, when the city first declared bankruptcy, Paul Krugman <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/22/opinion/krugman-detroit-the-new-greece.html">opined</a> that “Detroit does seem to have had especially bad governance, but for the most part the city was just an innocent victim of market forces.” Naturally, conservatives found precisely the opposite moral: that Detroit was simply the first shoe to drop, the first of many bankruptcies fueled by Democratic profligacy, the necessary result of the marriage of high-flying liberalism and unscrupulous public unions.<br /><br />I think the conservatives are closer to the mark than Paul, but both are trying to ignore the Great American Elephant, aka “race.” Dispassionate sociological analysis may someday discover why the sixties race riots only maimed cities like Washington, DC, New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago, but gave Detroit an ultimately mortal wound.* In all major American cities, black crime rose enormously, but somehow Detroit always led the rest. And only in Detroit did arson become an annual ritual and inner city sport.<br /><br />It’s hard to say if Coleman Young was “worse” than Washington, DC’s Marion Berry, but DC had the ever-giving cornucopia of the federal government, and Detroit did not. And while none of Berry’s successors came close to matching his record of corruption, Young’s successors did. The level of public services in Detroit became atrocious. The city was already on life support when the Great Contraction hit. GM and (maybe) Chrysler were worth saving, but Detroit was not. Chrysler makes lousy cars, but the City of Detroit makes nothing. </span></div>*Detroit is about 80% black, the highest percentage of any major U.S. city. Other "greater than 50%" cities are New Orleans and Baltimore (not doing terribly well) and Atlanta (54%), doing fairly well, and Washington DC (about 50%), prospering shamelessly. Alan Vannemanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16862545272673601332noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7619919736287774906.post-46366415142081121462013-10-29T06:00:00.000-04:002013-10-29T06:00:14.037-04:00Afro Latin Jazz Orchestra: "Let's Call This"<iframe width="420" height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/ueJtoSak7HU" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 15pt; margin: 0in 0in 12pt; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;"><span style="font-size: 11pt;">Arturo O'Farrill and the <a href="http://afrolatinjazz.org/">Afro Latin Jazz Orchestra</a> perform "Let's Call This," composed by Thelonious Monk, arranged by Jason Lindner, at Symphony Space at "Andy and Jerry's: A Tribute to the Gonzalez Brothers" on October 15, 2011. Special guests: Andy & Jerry Gonzalez. </span></div><br />Alan Vannemanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16862545272673601332noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7619919736287774906.post-16593107814970534552013-10-28T06:00:00.000-04:002013-10-28T06:00:10.103-04:00Pseudo New Yorker<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-lf5eYkissbM/Umwd3dzNU7I/AAAAAAAABGw/0bHlMtolStM/s1600/130930_contest_p465.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-lf5eYkissbM/Umwd3dzNU7I/AAAAAAAABGw/0bHlMtolStM/s400/130930_contest_p465.jpg" /></a><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 15pt; margin: 0in 0in 12pt; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;"><span style="font-size: 11pt;">Legal humor <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/humor/caption/">here</a>.<br /><br />“Don’t sweat it. He has the shtick, but we have the stick.”<br /><br />“No, it’s <i>Jerry</i> Steinbrenner. A lot of people make that mistake.”<br /><br />“His fast ball isn’t much, but his knuckler is a bear.”<br /><br />“Make him cover first. He’s way slow off the rubber.”<br /><br />“The thing you have to know about this guy is that you can’t outwait him.”<br /><br />“I thought that ‘Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse’ stuff was football.”<br /><br />“Damn Yankees. This is low, even for them.”<br /><br />“Well, if <i>he</i> isn’t illegal, that damn robe sure is.”<br /><br />“Hit it right back up the box. That’ll rattle his cage.”<br /><br />“Sure he’s a legend, but he still puts on his pants one leg at a time, just like the rest of us. I mean, he would, if he wore pants. You’re not afraid of a guy who wears a dress, are you?” </span></div>Alan Vannemanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16862545272673601332noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7619919736287774906.post-88586795520992217642013-10-24T06:00:00.000-04:002013-10-24T06:00:07.358-04:00Anne Applebaum, oddly ubiquitous<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 15pt; margin: 0in 0in 12pt; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;"><span style="font-size: 11pt;">Anne Applebaum is a distinguished journalist and scholar who has written about the horrors of the Soviet Gulag and the oppressive Communist rule in Eastern Europe following World War II. She is married to Radosław Sikorski, currently Poland’s Minister of Foreign Affairs. So why is she writing about <a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/foreigners/2013/10/iran_s_nuclear_negotiations_tehran_remains_a_brutal_and_dangerous_regime.html">Iran</a>? My guess is, synergy.<br /><br />In a recent piece appearing in <i>Slate</i>, Anne warns us that Iran is “a quasi-totalitarian state that since 1979 has been led by brutal, volatile men with no respect for the rule of law,” a state that cannot be allowed to have nuclear weapons. These “brutal, volatile men,” Anne tells us, are a regime that “is a ‘domestic’ problem for many Iranians, and it's a major problem for Iran's neighbors and the rest of the world.”<br /><br />Is Iran really so awful, Anne? Have they ever invaded anyone? They have been invaded themselves, by Saddam Hussein, who used chemical weapons on them, with our assistance, which sounds rather “brutal,” if not “volatile.” The U.S. once shot down an Iranian airliner, killing everyone on board, which sounds both brutal and volatile. And if financing terrorists is bad, how come <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/23/world/middleeast/obamas-uncertain-path-amid-syria-bloodshed.html?src=twr&pagewanted=all&_r=0">we're doing it</a>? Oh, that's right, we're not financing terrorists, we're financing <i>rebels</i>! Big fucking difference!<br /><br />As far as the nuclear stuff goes, we have dealt successfully with the overtly totalitarian regime of North Korea, which possesses nuclear weapons but has done nothing with them except rattle them clumsily, frightening no one but Charles Krauthammer. There is also Pakistan, which has nuclear weapons, and might be described by an unfriendly critic as being a “quasi-totalitarian state,” led by “brutal, volatile men with no respect for the rule of law,” and yet we are somehow an ally, of some sort, of that dubious nation. In earlier days, we managed to get along with the Soviet Union and Communist China, two massively totalitarian states, the USSR, of course, armed to the teeth with thousands of nuclear weapons. Today, both Russia and China could be called “quasi-totalitarian,” and both have nuclear arsenals far beyond the wildest dreams of the wildest Iranian fanatic, and yet we lose little sleep over them.<br /><br />Iran is not a “major problem” for its neighbors, much less the rest of the world. Anne is pretending that it is for, as I say, synergy, which I’m defining as “invitations to neo-con parties.” Anne would like the U.S. to play a more active role in Eastern Europe than, frankly, the U.S. needs to play. For the first time in about a hundred years—maybe I should make that three hundred—things are back to “normal” in Eastern Europe—a far better normal, in fact, than that area has ever known. Poland is no longer a part of anyone’s empire. Neither Germany nor Russia, least of all poor, forgotten Austria, have the least appetite for expansion. There is no reason for the U.S. to be Poland’s “big brother.” Anne. like the neo-cons, wants to maintain the global reach that was once necessary for the U.S. in the struggle against communism when the need for that reach no longer exists. And so she’s looking for allies—“I’ll exaggerate your bogyman if you’ll exaggerate mine.” </span></div>Alan Vannemanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16862545272673601332noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7619919736287774906.post-65451068400785560882013-10-23T06:00:00.001-04:002013-10-23T06:00:01.145-04:00Chad Lefkowitz-Brown: "We See"<iframe width="560" height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/r6NNA6qcGmU" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe><br /><br />Chad Lefkowitz-Brown, tenor saxophone; Steven Feifke, piano; Raviv Markovitz, bass; Jimmy Macbride, drums. Posted by <a href="http://www.youtube.com/channel/UCV17kvWvljT0Zw_5CZ4CFcA?feature=watch">Chad Lefkowitz-Brown</a> Alan Vannemanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16862545272673601332noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7619919736287774906.post-12796873769645229182013-10-22T06:00:00.000-04:002013-10-22T06:00:08.625-04:00The Shame of the Obamacare rollout<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 15pt; margin: 0in 0in 12pt; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;"><span style="font-size: 11pt;"> <br />Liberals like to think big. They like to think “comprehensive.” Whenever you read a liberal “big picture” plan, you will read thorough discussions of the various aspects of the problem to be solved, along with the appropriate solutions, and then you will get the kicker: you can’t address these problems separately; you have to do the whole thing in fell swoop.<br /><br />This “all or nothing” feature is always presented as accidental, something forced on the creators of the plan, not something they sought, but of course that’s a lie. The whole point is to do something great, something huge, something without compromise, something where compromise, far from being a necessity, is a, or rather the, mortal sin.<br /><br />The great granddaddy of Obamacare was a dude named Ira Magaziner, a graduate of Brown University who first dreamed of re-inventing Rhode Island via the "Greenhouse Compact." Unfortunately, the Rhode Island folks declined to be re-invented, but a dude like Ira doesn’t fail downwards. He fails upwards, and Magaziner eventually linked up with the Clintons, pushing plans for a national industrial policy that, sadly, never materialized.<br /><br />When Bill Clinton was elected, Magaziner was second only to Hillary herself on the White House Task Force to Reform Health Care, and had a major hand in creating that massive airship that never achieved liftoff. In 2008, a good 15 years after the failure of Billarycare, Team Obama naturally had no use for the advice of sixty-something has been like Ira, but that didn’t matter. Ira’s vision of rationalized, centralized planning, endowed with all the unprecedented powers of modern technology was inherently intoxicating to the liberal mind. One could at last go, where no person had ever gone before!<br /><br />If Obama, his domestic policy advisors, and Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius and her staff have any common decency, their faith in the ability of rational planning to improve the quality of American health care will be permanently reduced by the disastrous rollout of the Affordable Care Act. This was, after all, quite possibly, the most important day in the whole eight years of the President’s two terms, and, with everything on the line, he failed to deliver, and not with a stumble but rather a belly flop of the first water.<br /><br />This doesn’t prove that government is always bad and that the private sector is always right, but it does show that when government had every incentive to do its best, it couldn’t prevent itself from doing its worst.<br /><br /><b>Afterwords<br /></b>Ezra Klein, the liberal blogger who has been more or less the mouthpiece of the Obama Administration on health care, provides the following “<a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/10/21/wonkbook-can-obama-fix-obamacare">background</a>”: </span></div>The White House's senior staff—up to and including the president—was blindsided. Staffers deep in the process knew that HealthCare.gov wasn't ready for primetime. But those frustrations were hidden from top-level managers. Somewhere along the chain the information was spun, softened, or just plain buried.<br /><br />The result was that the White House didn't know the truth about its own top initiative -- and so they were unprepared for the disastrous launch. <br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 15pt; margin: 0in 0in 12pt; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;"><span style="font-size: 11pt;"> <br />I can’t believe that the president and his staff spent the past year sitting on their asses waiting for Kate to solve all their problems for them. If they did, they’re incredibly incompetent. But I strongly suspect that Ezra’s exclusive is a lie, and that Ezra is doing some pretty shameless source-greasing here. By passing along those sentiments without question and without attribution, Klein isn’t showing himself to be much of a reporter.</span></div>Alan Vannemanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16862545272673601332noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7619919736287774906.post-9392860931339031382013-10-21T06:00:00.000-04:002013-10-21T06:00:01.001-04:00Pseudo New Yorker<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-NrgLubVei_w/UmF89THAMiI/AAAAAAAABGg/nIBSF7DeMvM/s1600/130923_contest_p323.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-NrgLubVei_w/UmF89THAMiI/AAAAAAAABGg/nIBSF7DeMvM/s400/130923_contest_p323.jpg" /></a><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 15pt; margin: 0in 0in 12pt; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;"><span style="font-size: 11pt;">Legal humor <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/humor/caption/">here</a>.<br /><br />“Your Harry is a real brother-in-law’s brother-in-law, Dolores. How much is it going to cost me to get rid of <i>this</i> thing?”<br /><br />“Well, they’re back. That ‘Farewell to Fungus’ crap didn’t do a damn bit of good.”<br /><br />“Damn kids! Where’s the rest of him? I paid good money for that!”<br /><br />“What part of ‘highly polished aluminum finish’ don’t they understand?”<br /><br />The sudden emergence of “mega portrait fungus” caught many humans by surprise.<br /><br />“It’s at least a foot higher, Dolores. We either move or start selling tickets.”<br /><br />“Dolores, either I’m drunk or your garden gnomes have achieved megalo-metastasis.”<br /><br />“You’re right, Dolores. A three-quarters profile would be much more effective. I’ll have Ramon and Harry get on it this afternoon.”<br /><br />“Call the cops, Dolores. The Benson kids took his Ray-Bans again.”<br /><br />“I <i>love</i> it, Dolores. I just wish it didn’t play ‘Also Sprach Zarathustra’ every time the morning sun hits its forehead.” </span></div>Alan Vannemanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16862545272673601332noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7619919736287774906.post-11446491521118043402013-10-18T06:00:00.000-04:002013-10-18T14:29:25.262-04:00Big Picture Bullshit<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 15pt; margin: 0in 0in 12pt; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;"><span style="font-size: 11pt;">Apostate Republican <a href="http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/10/15/debt-ceiling-deal-may-be-struck-but-the-crisis-is-not-over-yet.html">David Frum</a> and apostate jerk* <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/robert-samuelson-the-shutdown-heralds-a-new-economic-norm/2013/10/13/de1235d4-32b6-11e3-89ae-16e186e117d8_story.html">Robert Samuelson </a>both back the camera up from the current fray di DC to give us the big picture.<br /><br />Says Frum: </span></div>Why are American politicians playing so rough? We have moved into an era of scarcity. Once it seemed possible to have the spending Democrats wanted, financed at the tax rates the Republicans wanted, while paying for sufficient national security and running bearable deficits. That sense of expansiveness is gone. The trade-offs between Obamacare and Medicare, between spending and taxes, suddenly seem acute, imminent, and zero sum. These disputes are not merely economic. As the United States becomes more ethnically diverse, debates over fiscal priorities inescapably become conflicts between ethnicities and cultures.<br /><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 15pt; margin: 0in 0in 12pt; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;"><span style="font-size: 11pt;">Says Samuelson: </span></div>Economic growth is a wondrous potion. It encourages lending because borrowers can repay debts from rising incomes. It supports bigger government because a growing economy expands the tax base and makes modest deficits bearable. Despite recessions, it buoys public optimism because people are getting ahead. The presumption of strong economic growth supported the spirit and organizational structures of postwar America.<br />…<br />Slow economic growth now imperils this postwar order. Credit standards have tightened, and more Americans are leery of borrowing. Government spending — boosted by an aging population eligible for Social Security and Medicare — has outrun our willingness to be taxed. The mismatch is the basic cause of “structural” budget deficits and, by extension, today’s strife over the debt ceiling and the government “shutdown.”<br /><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 15pt; margin: 0in 0in 12pt; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;"><span style="font-size: 11pt;">The only trouble with these big picture explanations is that they aren’t true. Back in the mid-nineties, the U.S. was a lot whiter than it is today (presuming that that is a “good” thing); the economy was booming; budget deficits were shrinking, and the national debt was too, after having doubled under Reagan. Yet the Republican assault on President Clinton was, if anything, even more virulent and even less founded in fact than the assault on President Obama. Bad Boy Bill really was the victim of a “vast right-wing conspiracy,” one that included Supreme Court justices and appellate court judges, members of Congress, right-wing journalists, think tanks, and activist entities, leavened with a generous helping of cash, and it all would have been for naught if Bill hadn’t been bound and determined to prove to Hillary that he could cheat on her even in the White House. And so the Republican House impeached a president for cheating on his wife and lying about it, and nothing more.† And if they had removed President Clinton from office, which, due to the makeup of the Senate, was impossible, they would have set at once to the impeachment of President Al Gore.<br /><br />The real pleasure of the Right these days is the politicization of governmental procedures to achieve arbitrary, extra-constitutional power. Despite their endless lauding of the constitution, they detest the existing system of checks and balances that creates a variety of independent centers of power. Under Gingrich, under Bush, and under Cruz, they are seeking some form of dictatorship, to somehow turn the clock back, to some time past, though exactly when is not yet known. </span></div>*OK, this epithet owes more to rhetorical balance than accuracy. Although Samuelson, to my mind, spends far too much time picking at Democratic nits while Republican locusts run wild, he will on rare occasion write a laudable column, for example, <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/robert-samuelson-capitalists-wait-while-labor-loses-out/2013/09/08/649dcc1a-1711-11e3-be6e-dc6ae8a5b3a8_story.html">this one</a>, which begins with the following unBoblike sentence: “In the struggle between capital and labor, capital is winning — and that’s hurting the feeble economic recovery.”<br /><br />†The frequent and shameful extra-legal interventions in the supposedly legal investigation of Clinton by the Special Prosecutor (initially, the “Whitewater Investigation”) are well described in <i>An Affair of State: The Investigation, Impeachment, and Trial of President Clinton </i>by U.S. Appellate Court Judge Richard Posner. Posner, who loathed Clinton, was nonetheless repeatedly stunned by the gross violations in legal ethics and procedure undertaken by the right-wing establishment to push things along. Ronald Dworkin, in <a href="http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2000/mar/09/philosophy-monica-lewinsky/">an excellent review</a> of Posner’s book points out that that Posner, with his repeated assertions of Clinton’s guilt, was probably worthy of both impeachment and removal from his judicial office himself, for “commenting” on an “impending case”—since Clinton was still liable to indictment in federal court when Posner published his book.<br /><br /><br /><br />Alan Vannemanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16862545272673601332noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7619919736287774906.post-54461888890573945552013-10-17T06:00:00.000-04:002013-10-17T06:00:05.136-04:00O Lucky Obama!<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 15pt; margin: 0in 0in 12pt; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;"><span style="font-size: 11pt;">A few weeks ago—or was it a few lifetimes?—I was remarking that <a href="http://avanneman.blogspot.com/2013/09/back-to-square-one-in-syria-has-it-come.html#!/2013/09/back-to-square-one-in-syria-has-it-come.html">it couldn’t be <i>possible</i></a> that President Obama could slide out of an utterly gratuitous, entirely self-inflicted mini-war with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad with the help of <i>Vladimir Putin</i>, but that’s exactly what happened. But of course that was only a warm-up. Now the President has only had to deal with 0.003% of the political heat he deserved as a result of the “catastrophic” debut of Obamacare, the program for which he presumably hopes he will be remembered. Yes, “catastrophic”—the term repeatedly used by <i>Washington Post</i> web wunderkind Ezra Klein, who probably knows more about the new health care program than anyone alive—more, in particular, than Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, who seems to have been a bit of a bystander at the unveiling.<br /><br />Sebelius almost surely deserves to be fired, but almost assuredly won’t be. She won’t be, because she doesn’t have to be, not when House Republicans are climbing to the top of the Washington Monument and then jumping off, so that when they land on their big fat asses it makes a <i>really </i>loud sound. With the thud of Republican lard ringing in their ears, no one has time to think of anything else.<br /><br />The best sign of how bad things are for the Republicans is that right-wingers don’t even want to talk about it. Bill Kristol is on a Mediterranean cruise, with ports of call at Corfu, Kotor, Dubrovnic, and Venice! The Adriatic, it seems, is charming this time of year! Who knew?<br /><br />Ramesh Ponnuru also reports on urgent matters: a new study sponsored by <i>Esquire</i> Magazine on the “New American Center” is, it seems, almost entirely elitist jive. Interesting!<br /><br />Jonah Goldberg, on the other hand, does comment on the Thrilla’ in DC, offering the sage advice to “just forget about it.” This whole brouhaha (or is it “kerfuffle”?) is like “family fights at a Thanksgiving table that are best forgotten.” Yes, and isn’t it fortunate that we have nondenominational holidays? <br /><b><br />Afterwords</b><br />I’m sure that President Obama’s limitless faith in the efficacy of centralized planning won’t be shaken by this truly embarrassing fiasco. It would be sort of like admitting that one is a fool. </span></div>Alan Vannemanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16862545272673601332noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7619919736287774906.post-33002334891322696402013-10-16T06:00:00.000-04:002013-10-16T06:00:00.231-04:00Government Spending, the Climate Change of the Tea Party Right<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 15pt; margin: 0in 0in 12pt; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;"><span style="font-size: 11pt;"> <br />To function properly in Washington, everyone needs a bogyman. One of the first things a newcomer learns in the nation’s capital is that the Chinese ideogram for “danger” also means “opportunity.” Whether this ubiquitous device exists anywhere outside the text for Motivational Speaking 101 is a moot point. What is not a moot point—what is far from moot indeed—is that it is useless in DC to advocate policies that are “good.” One can only achieve results by advocating policies that are “necessary”—necessary to ward off disaster.<br /><br />For the left, of course, the great bogyman is catastrophic climate change, a towering yet misty creature whose efficacy waxes and wanes with the economic weather. When times are tight, he somehow seems less threatening.<br /><br />For the neo-con right, the monster is Iranian nuclear capability, a similarly misty chap that has somehow maintained an uneasy existence in the parched Persian desert for decades, although, for some reason, only those wearing AIPAC lenses are able to see the beast clearly.<br /><br />For the Tea Party right, the great monster is government spending. This creature is much less misty. It walks among us, and you can touch it every day. Which, for the Tea Party, is part of the problem.<br /><br />The Senate is currently lurching, maybe, towards a semi-resolution of the question of whether the Republican Party is actually willing to let the government operate, and there’s a good deal of speculation as to the amount of damage the Tea Party crew has received. Have they been chastened?<br /><br />I would say “no,” because I would say that the Tea Party is about crisis politics rather than governing. House Republicans voted for “real” cuts in government spending in the abstract by supporting Rep. Paul Ryan’s “get real” budget, which supposedly sets us on the road to zero deficits in, well, thirty or forty years. Ryan achieves this by leaving Social Security, Medicare, and defense sacrosanct while cutting domestic spending aggressively. The domestic spending bills that would have made those cuts were never introduced on the House floor, because the Republicans couldn’t pass them. They wouldn’t vote for the spending cuts that they claim so fervently to desire.<br /><br />The icing on this cake o’ hypocrisy is that, to make everything fit, Ryan actually relied on the Medicare savings projected under Obamacare, the very program that, of course, the Republicans were denouncing as the End of American Civilization (Republicans no longer care about Western Civilization). <br /><br />So the Tea Party doesn’t want to govern. They want to fight. And, as long as they’re in office, they’re going to keep on fighting.<br /><br /><b>Afterwards I<br /></b>Ross Douthat, attempting to provide <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/13/opinion/sunday/douthat-the-kurtz-republicans.html?partner=rssnyt&emc=rss">some perspective </a>on the current Tea Party, critiques the situation as follows: “The methodless madness [of the Tea Party crew] distinguishes this shutdown from prior Congressional Republican defeats (the Gingrich shutdown, the Clinton impeachment), when you could at least see what the politicians involved were thinking.”<br /><br />In fact, Ross, the current “methodless madness” is <i>identical</i> to past Republican assaults on Democratic presidents. Once more, there is a pretense of policy [the “point” of the Gingrich shutdown was to force President Clinton to accept major cuts in Medicare, the precise opposite of the current Republican position] but the real purpose is to inflict political damage as an end in itself. Winston Churchill, writing of his father, Lord Randolph Churchill, when he first entered Parliament, remarked that he “was still young enough to enjoy political intrigue for its own sake.” That’s where the Tea Party Republicans are now. The more damage they cause, the happier they are. <br /><br /><b>Afterwords II<br /></b>There are spending cuts the Republicans would like to make, of course. They would be happy to cut, or, rather, to eliminate, anything that benefits “the poor.” Well, back in the day, liberals had a saying: “A program that only helps the poor is a poor program”—that is, a “targeted” program that doesn’t target the middle class as well as the poor will not survive politically. Of course, one could “solve’ the problem by eliminating welfare for the poor but not for the rich, which is exactly what House Republicans voted to do when they passed a 10 percent cut in spending for Food Stamps while leaving farm subsidies untouched. Unfortunately for the right, you can’t balance the budget on the backs of the poor, because the poor don’t get enough of the government’s cash. You can balance the budget on the backs of the middle class, but who wants to do that? </span></div>Alan Vannemanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16862545272673601332noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7619919736287774906.post-80431257467842124862013-10-15T06:00:00.000-04:002013-10-15T06:00:05.125-04:00The Mighty Whippoorwills: Bright Mississippi<iframe width="560" height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/oHE5Fx2P46I" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 15pt; margin: 0in 0in 12pt; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;"><span style="font-size: 11pt;"> <br />A funk version of “Bright Mississippi”/”Sweet Georgia Brown,” inspired by the Allen Toussaint version. Featuring Michael Gomez, guitar and vocals; Rich Huntley, drums; Debbie Kennedy, acoustic bass; Randy Weinstein,- chomatic, diatonic harmonica and vocals; recorded by Alex Goren. Posted by <a href="http://www.youtube.com/user/sigmonky?feature=watch">Randy Weinstein</a>. </span></div>Alan Vannemanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16862545272673601332noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7619919736287774906.post-17936164814867618512013-10-14T06:00:00.000-04:002013-10-14T06:00:11.141-04:00Pseudo New Yorker<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-fMYrk8vskdg/Ulg3v-DqQbI/AAAAAAAABGQ/ud979-iIE2g/s1600/130916_contest_p3232.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-fMYrk8vskdg/Ulg3v-DqQbI/AAAAAAAABGQ/ud979-iIE2g/s400/130916_contest_p3232.jpg" /></a><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 15pt; margin: 0in 0in 12pt; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;"><span style="font-size: 11pt;">Legal humor <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/humor/caption/">here</a>.<br /><br />“Of course you don’t get it. If you got it, this wouldn’t be happening.”<br /><br />“There’s only room for one bespectacled, pin-striped tight-ass in this office, and you’re looking at him.”<br /><br />“Welcome to the NRA, homeboy.”<br /><br />“Paybacks are hell, babycakes.”<br /><br />“Just think of it as your personal version of the Anderson account.”<br /><br />“Yes and no, Smedly, yes and no. Yes, this <i>is</i> because I wanted to be Santa at the Christmas Party. And, no, I don’t think I’m being a little petty.”<br /><br />“Just use that toe-ball-heel landing that we taught you, and you’ll be fine.”<br /><br />“Gold watches are so last century.”<br /><br />“Goldman Sachs is rewriting the book on executive terminations, Smedly, and we’re devoting a whole chapter just to you!”<br /><br />“Move it, sweet cheeks. This thing rents by the hour.” </span></div>Alan Vannemanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16862545272673601332noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7619919736287774906.post-40780208872918231972013-10-11T06:00:00.000-04:002013-10-11T06:00:11.380-04:00They'd none of them be missed<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 15pt; margin: 0in 0in 12pt; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;"><span style="font-size: 11pt;">A week or so <a href="http://avanneman.blogspot.com/2013/09/robert-gates-and-leon-panetta-theyll.html#!/2013/09/robert-gates-and-leon-panetta-theyll.html">I tried to dismiss </a>two former SecDefs (Gates and Panetta), who should be both gone and forgotten, using the headline “They’ll none of them be missed,” which led me to go on YouTube and look up performances of the Gilbert and Sullivan tune “I’ve Got a Little List” (aka “As Some Day It May Happen”), which must contain some of the most rewritten lyrics in history. The original, by W. S. Gilbert, was actually rather tepid, if you ignore the jabs at, um, “nigger serenaders” and the “lady novelist,” but, thanks to Gilbert’s use of the word “missed” in his tag, it’s almost impossible not to come up with a rhyme, so that we can all replace Gilbert’s Victorian ephemera with our own.<br /><br />In addition to “missed,” there are the additional past tenses of “kiss” and “hiss,” while we moderns can also avail ourselves of “diss” and “piss.” Then there are the “ist” nouns like “fist,” “gist,” “grist,” and “mist,” not to mention “cyst,” which probably doesn’t get used too often, along with the “ist” verbs like “insist” and “resist,” not to mention “wist”—back in the nineteenth century you could get away with “I wist” to fill out a short line a lot more easily than you can today. Beyond that are all the long “ist” nouns—like “philanthropist,” “misogynist,” etc., so useful in patter songs.<br /><br />The point of all this being, I would much rather listen to obscure, maybe funny to somebody somewhere versions of “They’d None of Them Be Missed” than write about House Speaker Boehner and his merry band of constitutional cutthroats. <br /><br /><iframe width="560" height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/1NLV24qTnlg" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe><br />Operaaustralia rocks The Mikado, with Mitchell Butel (“of Avenue Q fame,” or so I’m told) filling us in on who’s expendable Down Under.<br /><br /><iframe width="560" height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/DbHxh2NOJIw" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe><br />The Juneau Mikado, unfortunately not as well miked as one would like, engages in some Palin-impaling, and appropriately so.<br /><br /><iframe width="560" height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/PZwsbNn1g5k" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe><br />The Savoy Company, which started the whole G&S thing, delivers, appropriately enough, a largely “Get Off My Lawn” take. </span></div>Alan Vannemanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16862545272673601332noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7619919736287774906.post-56148824197377481042013-10-10T06:00:00.000-04:002013-10-10T06:00:13.858-04:00Judith Shulevitz, so not a scientist<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 15pt; margin: 0in 0in 12pt; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;"><span style="font-size: 11pt;">Judith Shulevitz, crackerjack gal o’ many opinions at the <i>New Republic</i>, has a piece in the print version of the Oct. 21issue (which I’ll link to as soon as it’s online) deploring the failure of the recent “36-page summary of a report about to come out from the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change” to make every living person realize that “human-induced global warming will irreversibly transmogrify earth, sea, and sky unless carbon emissions are capped” (Shulevitz’s words, not the U.N. panel’s). According to Shulevitz, it was a rebuttal to those who have done nothing to mitigate the risks of climate change, because they refuse to admit its plain facts.”<br /><br />It’s my guess that Shulevitz doesn’t realize that she’s conflating two very different arguments: 1) human activities are causing climate change (based on “fact”); and 2) failure to institute massive increases in the real cost of energy, unavoidably reducing global economic growth by trillions of dollars and ensuring that billions of people will not enjoy a decent standard of living, will reduce the entire earth to ecological ruin (based on computer models that attempt to predict the weather two centuries from now). For Shulevitz, 1 implies 2 as a simple matter of logical deduction.<br /><br />Shulevitz, of course, thinks that people who deny 2 are denying 1. They’re denying <i>science</i>! That’s <i>crazy</i>! In search of answers, she checks out “a handsome, puckish law and psychology professor at Yale named Dick Kahan.” According to Dick, people pretty much <i>love</i> science. The problem is, “people assimilate the data and choose the experts that fit most neatly with their and their peers’ values” (again, this is Shulevitz’s language).<br /><br />Shulevitz, of course, is coming out of the upper-middle-class literary milieu (“Yaley” if not actually “Yale”), which emphasizes personal charm as a virtue, which is why she tells us that Dick is both handsome and puckish, even though if his theories are “true” it wouldn’t matter if he were painfully fat, prematurely balding, and tiresomely self-important.<br /><br />As a rule of thumb, the notion that we unconsciously select the data that fits our preconceptions is certainly believable. Darwin said that he had to force himself to write down the title of any article that criticized his work, along with the issue number and title of the journal in which it appeared, because otherwise the “data” would immediately evaporate from his mind. But Shulevitz presents Kahan’s qualitative speculations (and they are no more than that) as empirically verified “findings,” the most “provocative” of which, relating to risk assessment, is that “people better at ‘cognitive reflection,’ or slow, probing thought, are actually more likely to arrive at predetermined conclusions about risk, not less.”<br /><br />Judith, honey, have you ever thought of looking in a mirror? Or is only <i>other</i> people who have problems?<br /><b><br />Afterwords</b><br />There are at least three good reasons why 2 doesn’t follow from 1.<br /><br />A) There is a great deal that we don’t know about the Earth, the atmosphere, the heavens, etc. Models that “fit” the past do not necessarily fit the present, nor can there be any assurance that they will fit the future.<br /><br />B) These models include many assumptions, both conscious and unconscious. It is my unkind conviction that many scientists, and many non-scientists, wish that control of society could be taken away from the “bad” people (i.e., capitalists) and given to the good ones (unselfish types like scientists and Judith Shulevitz). Climate control is simply a device to bring that about. If it were not climate control, it would be something else, like population control, or exhaustion of natural resources.<br /><br />C) Bringing the current increase in carbon in the atmosphere would be inconceivably expensive. We would be asking people to accept massive reductions in economic growth to ward off an evil that would appear, if at all, long after most of us are dead. It is not right to ask people to make such sacrifices, and it is utterly ludicrous to expect that they will agree to do so. </span></div>Alan Vannemanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16862545272673601332noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7619919736287774906.post-47689275246955937782013-10-09T06:00:00.000-04:002013-10-09T06:00:09.419-04:00Smashing Time<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 15pt; margin: 0in 0in 12pt; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;"><span style="font-size: 11pt;"> <br />Dave Weigel has <a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2013/10/house_republicans_debt_default_and_government_shutdown_the_gop_thinks_the.html">a nice piece </a>over at <i>Slate</i> explaining why the Tea Party Republicans in the House won’t negotiate with Obama. Because they think he’s lying, about everything. Everything that anyone in the Executive Branch says about the government shutdown and the debt ceiling is a lie. In fact, any statement, by any expert, that supports the president’s position must be a lie. If they say there is danger, well, that proves that there isn’t any danger. So as long as people keep warning about “danger,” well, that proves we don’t have anything to worry about. And if something does break, it will be Obama's fault, because he didn't do the right thing, whatever it was, just as, according to Ron Paul, Lincoln caused the Civil War. There was another guy who wouldn't negotiate.<br /><br />And Eric Posner has <a href="http://www.newrepublic.com/article/115034/debt-ceiling-3-ways-obama-could-circumvent-congress">a nice piece </a>in the <i>New Republic</i> explaining why Obama needs to let things fall apart: the public will accept “arguably” extra-constitutional actions by the President as long as they believe the country is in a real crisis. And the only way to do that, for real, is to have a real crisis, not the prospect of one.<br /><br />Several years ago, Obama more or less lamented that he came into office before the Great Contraction was ripe enough to convince people that we were in an unlimited emergency. In fact, it’s at least “arguable” (once more) that the Great Contraction constituted a graver danger than the terrorist attacks of 9/11, which have in fact never been repeated on any sort of significant scale, unless, like Bill Kristol, you were really afraid of the underwear bomber.<br /><br />The Wall Street boys will moan about the need to compromise, but until stocks start dropping by a thousand points a day, they aren’t going to get on the horn to House Speaker Boehner and tell him that if he doesn’t fix things now they’ll be putting all their chips on Hillary in 2016. And so we’re going to have to wait a while.<br /><br /><b>Afterwords<br /></b>Why do the heathen rage? Why do Republicans detest Democratic presidents as a compulsion? Clinton was as hated as Obama, when stocks were soaring and deficits were disappearing. Plus, no national health care! I hate to get all socio-cultural on your ass, but I would point you to yet another article, this one <a href="http://nymag.com/news/features/antonin-scalia-2013-10/">an interview with Justice Scalia </a>in <i>New York </i>magazine, in which Nino bemoans the “shrill” liberalism of the <i>Washington Post</i>, which he no longer reads. Well, I no longer read it either, but it’s not because of any shrill liberalism. In fact, I would say that the <i>Post</i>’s liberalism has been trending downwards ever since the election of President Reagan. Into the early oughties, at least, the <i>Post</i>’s editorial page did cling to the “standard” liberal line that it was an outrage that the U.S. lacked universal healthcare, but otherwise the Post’s political liberalism was tepid at best.<br /><br />Social liberalism is another matter, gay rights in particular. For decades, the <i>Post</i> couldn’t get enough of those fabulous gays, who were just like us, only cooler. Since I don’t really see the Post any more, I can’t say for sure that that still isn’t the case, but I had the strong impression, as the <i>Post</i> and I were going our separate ways, it wasn’t the case. Back in the day, the <i>Post</i> took it for granted that J. Edgar Hoover and best boy Clyde Tolson were a pair of old queens. In today’s <i>Post</i>, apparently, they were just good friends.<br /><br />Um, was I talking about Justice Scalia? Yeah. I think it was the gay thing that pissed Scalia off. In his book, homos were homos, pure and simple. How can a man sit down to his breakfast and read about a bunch of damn homos? It’s fucking insane. For Scalia and his ilk, all they can see in the U.S. is wall to wall homos, and maybe a bunch of damn immigrants. They’re mad, and madness must find release. And so they hate the Democratic president as the symbol and source of the hateful world they live in. </span></div>Alan Vannemanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16862545272673601332noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7619919736287774906.post-51861421896668947672013-10-08T05:00:00.000-04:002013-10-08T05:00:09.783-04:00The Bossa Boys: "Bright Mississippi"<iframe width="420" height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/y5eMYYN-G8g" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 15pt; margin: 0in 0in 12pt; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;"><span style="font-size: 11pt;"> <br />Definitely amateur video still brings us jazz on a summer’s day as the Bossa Boys have a good time with Thelonious Monk’s reworking of “Sweet George Brown.” Posted by <a href="http://www.youtube.com/user/burkowitz?feature=watch">burkowitz<br /></a></span></div>Alan Vannemanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16862545272673601332noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7619919736287774906.post-13367327902733682702013-10-07T06:00:00.000-04:002013-10-07T06:00:08.844-04:00Pseudo New Yorker<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-t42KfgQkH84/Uk8WxekSZtI/AAAAAAAABGA/FT1VtI167jc/s1600/130902_contest_p465.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-t42KfgQkH84/Uk8WxekSZtI/AAAAAAAABGA/FT1VtI167jc/s400/130902_contest_p465.jpg" /></a><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 15pt; margin: 0in 0in 12pt; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;"><span style="font-size: 11pt;">Legal humor <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/humor/caption/">here</a>.<br /><br />“Nuh-uh, girl friend. Daddy does the smiting around here.”<br /><br />“Hey, big shot! Only once a month, and only at trees!”<br /><br />“Stop aiming them at your ex-wives!”<br /><br />“Looks like someone’s going to be repeating ‘What Would Jesus Do 101’ real soon!”<br /><br />“Trust me, lightning bolts aren’t going to stop the Street from shorting your company. Your projected earnings are more inflated than the Goodyear Blimp!”<br /><br />“The Blessed have many privileges, but revenge isn’t one of them.”<br /><br />“Dude, if you’re going to throw one at every person who said you’d never make it here, we’re going to have to start charging you.”<br /><br />“The thing is, every one you throw, you gain a pound. Two more, and that cloud won’t hold you.”<br /><br />“Dude, we do it to nitrogenize the soil, not to make the sissy britches run.”<br /><br />“I don’t think we’re talking about the fear of God here. I think we’re talking about the fear of Harvey L. Jackson, and those are two very different things!” </span></div>Alan Vannemanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16862545272673601332noreply@blogger.com0